Here are some fairly recent photos of the US Flag flying around the Big Lake area in eastern Arizona:
Friday, July 1, 2022
Glorious Old Glory
Here are some fairly recent photos of the US Flag flying around the Big Lake area in eastern Arizona:
Thursday, July 1, 2021
Fourth of July, 2021
This year's July post takes a departure from the typical, American look at the 4th of July. If you wish to seek those out, please see the link to the "summer" label at left. Or look for July listings in most previous years.
I will link this one post featuring beautiful places in the U.S.
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
Signs of Change
In Romans 8:18-23, St. Paul wrote about how all creation was subjected to futility, to frustration, not because it did anything wrong, but because God decreed it. (See Genesis chapter 3 where the very ground was cursed because of humanity's sin. Sinful humanity could not be allowed to live on in an otherwise perfect creation.) Paul talks of creation groaning as if in labor pains, waiting to be set free.
Over the past 2 years, I have finally gotten my favorite flower, black-eyed Susans, to grow here, though outside of its range. This year, however, one of the plants is putting out some freakish flowers with multi fused heads. Below are photos of one with three fused heads developing.
open with some "normal" heads |
These links will provide you other black-eyed Susan photos and a poem I wrote about black-eyed Susans a couple years ago.
Friday, October 2, 2020
Volunteering
During this COVID time, we are limiting our travelling and exposure. We did take some time to do some socially distanced, responsible volunteer painting. (My husband held the ladder while I got up into the pinnacle!)
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Nature is Never Spent (*)
"For all this, nature is never spent."*
As unto urban wastelands sent
Was this poetic English gent
Ourselves are now to parched lands lent,
Absorbing well what Hopkins meant.
I see no British Isles lush~
I look on desert city rush~
Adapting as that orange-breast thrush**
I find my own internal hush.
"There lives the dearest freshness deep-down things,"*
As I admire our flowerings
And still the robin gamely sings.**
"For all this, nature is never spent."
On earth, this comes as form of rent
Until we dwell in Christ's new tent.***
--C. Marie Byars, 2020 (c)
[during covid and unrest times, but not in direct response]
*From Gerard Manley Hopkins', SJ, 1877 poem
God's Grandeur
**A robin is a type of thrush. Its wide range suggests it's adaptable.
***Tent/tabernacle/dwelling. The Old Testament Tabernacle was a durable, highly ornate tent with a special purpose for worship. There, God's visible presence on earth could be found. In John 1: 14, "The Word [Christ] became flesh and 'tabernacled' among us." The Greek word for 'dwelling' means more literally 'tented.'
Friday, May 1, 2020
In May
When buds are dropping chaff and scale,
And, wafted from the greening vale,
Are pungent odors, keen as grief.
And orchards hint a leafy screen;
While willows drop their veils of green
Above the limpid waters bright.
And whippoorwill is overdue,
While spice bush gold is coined anew
Before her tardy leaves are born.
Makes mimic sunshine in the shade,
Anemone is not afraid,
Although she trembles in her place.
The ferns unroll their woolly coils,
And honey-bee begins her toils
Where maple trees their fringe unfold.
The wild bee drones her mellow bass,
And butterflies of hardy race
In genial sunshine bask and float.
The outlines of his broad design
So soon to deepen line on line,
Till June and summer days begin.
Beneath the trees in grove and field,
And all the wounds of life be healed,
By orchard bloom and lilac scent.
--John Burroughs, 1837-1921
*"Mold" in British English. Flowers are now adorning the ground, where before moldy leaf remnants lay
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
I Will Praise the Lord at All Times
Winter has a joy for me,
While the Saviour's charms I read,
Lowly, meek, from blemish free,
In the snowdrop's pensive head.
Life-invigorating suns:
Hark! the turtle's plaintive song
Seems to speak His dying groans!
Summer has a thousand charms,
All expressive of His worth;
'Tis His sun that lights and warms,
His the air that cools the earth.
What! has autumn left to say
Nothing of a Saviour's grace?
Yes, the beams of milder day
Tell me of his smiling face.
While the sun makes haste to rise;
See His bleeding beauties drawn
On the blushes of the skies.
Slowly moving in the west,
Shews an emblem of His grace,
Points to an eternal rest.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
More Flowers of the Upper Midwest
Travels (related to the Christian life) took me to Minnesota recently. Though I love the southwest, there are things there I find refreshing:
Johnny Jump-Up; violet strain |
" '26So if you cannot do such a small thing,' [said Jesus] 'why do you worry about the rest? 27Consider how the lilies grow: They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was adorned like one of these. 28If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you, O you of little faith!…' "
Friday, July 5, 2019
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Patriotism & the Christian
Lewis' 1960 book, The Four Loves, grew out of some 1958 radio talks. The book tucks the subject of patriotism into the chapter, "Likings and Loves for the Sub-human." [The actual four loves are affection, friendship, eros/romantic love and agape/charity.] So we see right off that he is cautious about patriotism as a primary motivation. He is generally cautious about elevating any of the human loves too high: “We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. Human loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.” Lewis divides patriotism into four "ingredients" or "layers."
"The third thing", or strand of patriotism is probably the most recognized. Lewis calls it, “a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others.” This is certainly a form of patriotism that can steer us wrong over time, so to lose our judgment.
He writes of broken treaties with Native Americans, extermination of Australian aborigines, Apartheid in South Africa and Nazi gas-chambers. “On the lunatic fringe it may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid...” Ignoring the achievements and perspectives of other nations and cultures can lead to a sense of superiority that justifies the mistreatment and exploitation of others.
There's a point at which patriotism can even breed lawlessness, the fourth ingredient. "When natural loves become lawless," Lewis writes, "they do not merely do harm to other loves; they themselves cease to be the loves they were--to be loves at all." "We know now that this love becomes a demon when it becomes a god." In this fourth aspect, patriotism can have the ingredient of alleged "duty" toward other countries, but from a position of power, not out of kindness. Patriotism reaching this demonic form unconsciously denies patriotism itself.
“No man,” said one of the Greeks, “loves his city because it is great, but because it is his,” A man who really loves his country will love her in her ruin and degeneration “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.” She will be to him “a poor thing but mine own.” He may think her good and great, when she is not, because he loves her; the delusion is up to a point pardonable...I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine I become insufferable. The pretense that when England’s cause is just we are on England’s side as some neutral Don Quixote might be for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.
Lewis is not arguing that there is no right side nor wrong side. He is cautioning against seeing your own country as always and only on the right side of morality. This false thinking keeps the citizenry from acknowledging its mistakes. When you equate your movements with God's movings, then you grant your country the status of being beyond questioning. As Lewis says, if any country has this, then they feel they have the right and even the "responsibility" to annhiliate any and all enemies because the nation cannot be wrong. Even act is seen as moral because of the sense that the nation is sacred. Every decision is right because of the country which made it. This is the the demonic patriotism because the nation has become a god.
Lewis also had some interesting thoughts on patriotism in The Screwtape Letters. Here is an excerpt from an elder demon telling his nephew about leading a man away from God: "Let him begin by treating Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of the partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which religion merely becomes part of the 'Cause'...Once you have made the World an end, and Faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."
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If we insist that somehow America would never do that, then we are indulging the very pride that increases the likelihood our nation will go down that path. Americans defended slavery for a century. We embraced racial segregation for decades after that. The KKK has seen various resurgencies over the centuries. Besides repression of Blacks, it has bred hostilities towards other vulnerable demographics. Life movements seek to protect other types of vulnerable populations this country that do not have sufficient protections. Whole life movements seek to do this in a broader sense.
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Another danger of muddling our two citizenships is the risk of forgetting our primary citizenship is in heaven. Here on earth, we are wanderers and roamers. In fact, we ourselves are even exiles, as St. Peter writes in I Peter 2:11: "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles." St. Paul writes in Philippians 3:20: "Our citizenship is in heaven." The unknown author of Hebrews describes the heroes of faith "longing for a better country--a heavenly one" (Heb. 11:16). This world is fallen, broken, and we wait for the new creation in heaven, as spoken of in Romans chapter 8 and Revelation 21.